Search Results

“... by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited London, where Harry purchased a rare ...”

“... their original names – a death sentence.* Meanwhile the justice secretary feels he must pay lip-service to her status in all of this. In 1993, there was no liberal orthodoxy to apply to the case, and there isn’t now. Yet we should still think about Boy A and Boy B, who only became known to us as Robert Thompson and Jon ...”

“... The reticence of Riding seems to inform Other Traditions. These lectures perform an invaluable service, in that they create a new context for the reconsideration of neglected poets. Ashbery offers thumbnail biographies of each poet while focusing on the way in which the poems themselves lead their own life. With the exception of Clare, little of the work ...”

“... statism. Through it, he argues, ‘conservatives enshrined human rights as European values in the service of a nostalgic Christian vision of the European legal order, not a liberal cosmopolitan one.’ So if to modern readers the European convention, which includes practically no social or collective rights, looks like a 19th-century manifesto of liberal ...”

“... Oradea in Romania) but the First World War disrupted his studies and after reluctant service in the Imperial Army he settled alongside thousands of other displaced Ostjuden in the neighbourhood of Leopoldstadt in Vienna, where my grandfather was born. In 1939, the family escaped to London, where my mother was born in 1947. Around a century after ...”

“... left. Best supporting actress, Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers; best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer; best actress, Emma Stone in Poor Things; best actor, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers; best director, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. Best Picture? The word was out before Christmas, it will be Oppenheimer. There’s your big ...”

“... Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the Government. His tough talk sounded like saloon-bar bragging until, to the astonishment of all who knew him, Routledge brought down Mandelson. But the minister’s resignation was a ...”

“... did A.J.P. Taylor very much good – any more than it did Michael Foot, Harold Nicolson, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Driberg or any of the other literati who seem to have lost a dimension in the service of that heterogeneous collection of unlikeable lost causes that Beaverbrook picked up. Taylor wrote that the ...”

“... financial system itself. The EU claims it runs a ‘fully autonomous sanctions regime’ in the service of ‘safeguarding EU values’. But for the most part its sanctions, and those of the UK, are applied in conjunction with US power. The structure of international finance means that even the largest banks can’t afford to provoke American ire.Iran is ...”

“... the crowd as ‘fellow citizens’ and maintained calmly that, after a lifetime of loyal military service to his country, he was being executed for a crime of which ‘I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty than any of you who may now be hearing me.’ Cautioned by the sheriff, he signed off with the hope that ‘the principles of freedom, of humanity ...”

“... in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church in the afternoon is packed. I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and unexpectedly rounded off by Ben, her middle son, who despite grief and nerves manages to say what his mother had meant to him and his two ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”

“... Ricketts was medical superintendent of the Smallpox Hospitals and River Ambulance Service of the Metropolitan Asylums Board. The haemorrhagic rash matures on the tenth day; death occurs about this time. A quarter of a century has gone by since the last natural case of smallpox anywhere in the world. Ali Maow Maalin, a cook at the hospital in ...”

“... not devolve to autonomous agencies. Many services, indeed, might stand to gain, since the Civil Service has (or had) responsibilities that could best be discharged by others. But the configuration of such agencies has to be tightly drawn and the lines of accountability clearly understood; and in practice, as he notes, many of the quangos are not accountable ...”

“... in Bowler’s book demonstrates how strongly biological theory could be pressed into political service. This was not solely a 19th-century phenomenon. When the notions of racial hierarchy and lineal development were replaced in the 1920s by a Darwinian branching tree, a new generation took this as a further legitimation of their imperial demands: the ...”